


Unpraying

by stardropdream



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Episode Related, M/M, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-01 03:12:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8604958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardropdream/pseuds/stardropdream
Summary: During the war, Porthos has a conversation with God.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to tumblr for the prompt, "Porthos during the war years, one day in which he's particularly miserable and rants to God about taking Aramis away from him, hasn't Porthos lost enough already?"

This is what Porthos knows about God: 

As a child, he’d begged God for help for three things only. For more food. For his mother to heal. For his father to come find him. In hindsight, growing older, he knew each one was a foolish wish – wishes he knew could never be fulfilled, much less by an entity that seemed to care less than nothing for him. There were never any true churches in the Court, and as a child he so rarely left its walls except to pickpocket with Charon and Flea, that he never really understood the habit of a house of worship – only knew the laws and morals of the thieving brotherhood, of coming home each night to make sure Charon and Flea got enough to eat, that they were all in it together. 

When he did leave, when he did become a soldier, he fell into the ranks like he did all things – dove in headfirst even if he didn’t know the ropes yet. He learned. He knew enough to get by, and it didn’t require a lot of knowledge when each service was in Latin – a language he couldn’t begin to understand save for stray words he began to understand in context. It never became natural, not like it ever was for Aramis – but he learned.

This is what Porthos learns of God: 

He learned what Aramis spoke – softer words, gentler promises, the words of a God who did care but in ways that weren’t the same as a human care. A God of love and a God of mercy. Porthos never spoke his doubts – because what could he know? And Aramis understood even what Porthos never said, understood better than anyone else what sorts of hardships a child can undergo. Despite all the loss Aramis has seen, too, he never turned away from God. But then, Porthos always knew Aramis was stubborn.

This is what Porthos feels about God:

Men dying in the dirt, in pools of their own blood – too many bodies to properly bury, too many men whose names Porthos never knew. 

The long droughts without water, without sustenance – men dying of thirst in the pits. Long, brutal winters – without proper clothes, without proper fires. Men freezing in their sleep, never waking up again, no flaky, wisping breath misting in the air to indicate that they still live. 

Porthos has known hardship and known loss his entire life – but every man, he thinks, must have their breaking point. He’s gone and come back again, nobody ever knowing that shame – only God, he supposes bitterly, will know of his cowardice and his weakness. And maybe it’s who he’s always been, and maybe it’s what God has always known him to be—

He clenches his eyes shut, curling into himself during a particularly long blast of cold winter chill. Athos snorts in his sleep and d’Artagnan tries to scramble closer to the fire as he sleeps. It’s Porthos’ turn to watch. He hates it – hates the years of sleep he’s missed, how he’s never been able to sleep peacefully since the Court, since his mother died in her sleep and he didn’t get a chance to say goodbye—

Hates it because it just reminds him of ripping off his pauldron and wandering into the woods. Before eventually turning back and sitting, miserably, in the dirt with the dead and the dying. 

And like every night, his eyes turn out towards the wooded hills – where just at sunset he heard the distant bells tolling, alerting the monks to the night. It’s a cruel thought, to be so close and yet far away, to know that there’s a man out there he’ll never see again.

He shivers in his armor, hunching into himself. His eyes sting – not from the cold, but from the tears he’s been holding back for months, ever since they rode into the monastery and were resolutely turned away. His heart is a jagged mess of broken pieces and it doesn’t matter – not to Aramis, not to God, not to anyone who can look at him and only see the good soldier that he’s made himself to be, despite all his faults. 

He clenches his eyes shut and forces out a shaky breath. His breath mists up in a cloud of white fog. 

He clenches his fingers hard against his arms. 

This is what Porthos says to God:

There is nothing in this life worth fighting for. There is nothing left for him aside to die in the dirt just like everyone else, with no one left to mourn him. 

Every moment he had, every little moment of happiness he had – it’s all gone now, never to return. 

Porthos knows it’s only a matter of time before they all die in the dirt, just like everyone else. 

And no one – 

Aramis will never—

He doesn’t finish the thought, opening his eyes and staring into their feeble fire. He kicks a stone into it, stands up, and nudges d’Artagnan awake.

“Your turn for watch,” he says, then kneels down and curls up on the ground, back to d’Artagnan before d’Artagnan can wake up properly and ask him how he’s feeling. 

He doesn’t want to answer. The answer is clear, has been clear for years now. 

He closes his eyes – curses God, again, for taking away everything he ever cared about. A God of love and a God of mercy, Aramis once told him. 

At the time he’d been willing to believe him. Now he knows it for the goddamn joke that it is. 

He sleeps unsoundly. He dreams of Aramis and wakes in the morning pretending he didn’t, just like every night.


End file.
